Monthly Archives: November 2013

NTVS runs inside VS2012 or VS2013. Some node.js enthusiasts had forked PTVS and begun some spikes of node tools for VS. At the same time the PTVS team was also working on node.js integration, so they all joined forces and made NTVS a community project. NTVS was developed by the same team that brought you PTVSwith help from friends like Bart Read from Red Gate (he did the npm GUI), and Dmitry Tretyakov from Clickberry for several debugger fixes & features.

NTVS is open source from the start, and has taken contributions from the very start. It supports Editing, Intellisense, Profiling, npm, Debugging both locally and remotely (while running the server on Windows/MacOS/Linux), as well publishing to Azure Web Sites and Cloud Service.

It’s actually pretty freaking amazing how they did it, so I encourage you to download it and give it a try because some of the stuff (even given this is an alpha) is very very clever.

Node.js Tools for Visual Studio takes advantage of V8 Profiling API’s as well Visual Studio’s Reporting features to give you a sense of where your program is spending its time.

NOTE: See that File | New Project dialog up there? Visual Studio organizes things by language, so node.js is under JavaScript. But you’ve also got Python and Django, iOS and Android via C#, TypeScript, VB, F#, all in Visual Studio.

One of the things that’s impressed me about the way they integrated node.js into Visual Studio was that they didn’t try to recreate or re-do things that already worked well. It’s node, it runs node.exe, it uses the V8 debugger, it uses the V8 profiler because that’s what people use. Duh. But, for example, NTVS can take the output from the V8 profiler and display it using the Visual Studio Profiler Reporting Tools. No need to reinvent the wheel, just use the right tool for the job.

Then tell node.js for VS that the startup file is index.js, hit Next, save the project file and Finish.

At this point, you’ve got Ghost inside VS.

Random: that since I have Web Essentials I also get a nice split-screen markdown editor as well.

From here, just hit F5 to Debug, or Ctrl-F5 to start without Debugging. Also notice the properties of the Project in the lower right corner there showing the node path and port as well as the Startup File. You can change these, of course.

Here’s me running Ghost locally. You can see the path to node, the ghost.js file and my browser.

You’ll get good intellisense for completions and help for method signatures.

DEBUGGING

Node.js Tools for Visual Studio includes complete support for debugging node apps. This includes support for Stepping, Breakpoints, “Break on exception”, as well as Locals, Watch, Immediate and Call Stack tool windows.

You can manage Exceptions just like any other language service. See in the dialog below node.js exceptions are listed along with other exceptions in managed and unmanaged code.

The debugging still happens like it always has, with the node V8 debugger, except Visual Studio connects to the debugger over another socket (remember, you can even debug node.js remotely running on a Linux or Mac like this!) and translates how V8 thinks into how Visual Studio thinks about debugging. The experience is seamless.

See in this screenshot, you can see node.exe is being debugged, I’m running Ghost. You can see my Call Stack, and the Locals in the Watch Window. I can inspect variables, step around and do everything you’d want to do when debugging a Web App.

NPMVISUAL STUDIO

The npm experience is pretty cool as well. Node.js for Visual Studio is always watching the file system so are more than welcome to run npm from the command line or from within the node immediate window and Visual Studio will see the changes.

You can also use the npm Package Management dialog and search the repository and install packages graphically. It’s up to you.

Here’s a package installing…

The physical node_modules and how modules are handled is pure node…VS doesn’t touch it or care. However, the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio also presents a logical view on top of the physical view.

NOTE: I really like this. I think it has potential and I’d even like to see references in .NET treated like this. The physical and the logical, along with a dependency tree showing NuGet packages. It helped me understand the project much better.

There’s lots more. There’s an REPL interactive window, and you can just publish like any other web project using the same Publish Wizard that ASP.NET projects use. You can publish node.js apps directly to Azure as well, either with Git or with Visual Studio publishing.

As mentioned, you can do remote debugging between Visual Studio and node running on any server OS.

CONCLUSION

I’m personally pretty happy with th

e way that Visual Studio is turning (in a short amount of time, seems to me) into quite the competent language and environment factory.

Node.js Tools for Visual Studio is entirely open source under the Apache license and they welcome contributions and bug reports. It’s Alpha and it’s early but it’s awesome. Go get it. Big congrats to all involved!

Do you have a lot of bookmarks saved in your Google Chrome Web browser? If you’ve been saving and constantly adding new bookmarks for months or even years, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have some links that are no longer valid.

You’ll probably also have a few duplicates here and there, since there’s no way that you can possibly remember every single bookmark you have. Meaning, you may often bookmark the same link.

Managing a large amonut of bookmarks is hard work, especially if you try to do it manually. One of the easiest ways to manage your bookmarks and automatically check for duplicates and bad links, is with the Chrome extension Bookmark Sentry.

2. As soon as it’s installed, the extension will automatically scan all of your bookmarks. Within seconds, you should see your scan results automatically open in a new tab; this process may take longer if you have a very large amount of bookmarks.

3. You should see all of your bookmark “problems” listed on the results page. You can manually check each problem (click on the link in the Bookmark column), and delete the bookmarks that are no longer valid (click on the X in the Delete column).

4. You are also free to do a manual scan at any time from the Bookmark Sentry Dashboard, located on its Options page (wrench -> Tools -> Extensions -> click on Options under Bookmark Sentry). Click on the “Scan Now” button when you’re ready.

When the scan is done, the Bookmark Sentry Scan Results page will open up in a new tab, just as it did when you first installed the extensions.

5. From the Bookmark Sentry Dashboard, you can also schedule automatic daily, weekly, or monthly scans. Choose your preferred interval from the “schedule scan” menu; a monthly scan is already enabled by default. You can choose to check for just bad links, just duplicates, or both bad links and duplicates.

With Bookmark Sentry, you no longer have to worry about duplicate bookmarks or bad links; it does all of the work for you.

Software Architects have been involving lot of debates about different approaches and architectures. Some of the examples are ORM Vs Store Procedures, REST Vs SOAP, etc. There is a debate happening inside the Microsoft community about ASP.net web form Vs ASP.net MVC. Many people thinking that ASP.net MVC will be replace webforms at least eventually and others are thinking that ASP.net MVC will not be replace webforms. Will ASP.net MVC replace webforms?. ASP.net MVC is an alternative approach to webforms rather than a replacement. It will not replace webforms and webforms will not replace ASP.NET MVC. The fact is that ASP.NET MVC and webforms will co-exist and that ASP.NET MVC is not a replacement for webforms. If you prefer ASP.net MVC use it and you feel webform is more comfortable, you can use it. . Both approaches are just choices and different approaches and choices are good things. Different choices are available for other platforms especially in the Java platform.

Problems with ASP.net Web Form

What are the problems with webforms? In webforms, Microsoft has tried to make windows form model development for web application development. That model was attracted lot of windows form developers especially VB 6.0 developers. Many of VB 6.0 developers had moved to ASP.net web development without knowing the basics of HTTP and web. For simulating windows form model development experience, webforms introduced event-driven approach and also introduced Viewstate and Postback. The end result is that web forms breaks the stateless nature of the Web. Both Viewstate and Postbacks have been made lot of problems and increased complexity of the web application development. Many web pages having hundreds of KB size of Viewstate that affected the performance of the applications sometime. Developers do not have the control of the rendering HTML of web forms and Server controls that render html with mixed inline style and deprecated tags that does not follows standards. Another problem with Web Forms is the integration of JavaScript frameworks due to the naming conventions of rendered HTML. The page life cycle of the Web Form is too complex and has the tightly coupling between all things in the ASP.net framework and a single class is used both to display output and handles user input. So unit testing is almost an impossible task. Today unit testing is very important in modern software development especially when we following agile methodologies and practices. Since web is a stateless thing, Events, Postbacks and Viewstate are not a good way. Today many ASP.net web form developers are facing different type pf browser compatibility issues when developing public face internet applications

The ASP.net MVC way

The ASP.NET MVC simplifies the complex parts of ASP.net Web Forms without any compromise of the power and flexibility of ASP.NET platform. ASP.net MVC implements Model-View-Controller UI pattern for web application development that lets you allows to develop applications in a loosely couples manner. MVC pattern is separating the application in three parts- Model, View and Controller. A view is responsible for rendering the user interface (UI) of the application and it is nothing more than html templates that filled with application’s data passed by the controller. The Model implements the logic for the application’s data and it represents the business objects of the application that using the View for rendering user interface. Controllers are handles and responds to user input and interaction. The web request will be handled by the controller, and the controller will decide which model objects to use and which view objects to render. The MVC model replaces the Web Form events with the controller actions. The main advantages of the MVC models are clear separation of concerns, unit testing facility, and more control over the URLs and HTML. The MVC model does not use Viewstate, Postbacks, Server controls, and server-based forms that enable full control over the application and html rendered by the Views. MVC model is using Representational state transfer (REST) based URLs instead of file-name extensions used by the Web Form model so that we can make search engine optimization (SEO) URLs published by the application.

The below code shows the implementation of MVC application.

ProductsController.cs (Controller)

In this sample, I have used extension methods to the HtmlHelper class to display ordered list of information.

OrderListExtensions.cs

Category.aspx (View)

Advantages of MVC Model

Enable clean separation of concerns (SoC) .

Enable full control over the rendered HTML.

Enable Test Driven Development (TDD) (built with TDD in mind).

SEO and REST friendly URL.

Easy integration with JavaScript frameworks.

Support third-party view engines such as NVelocity, Brail, NHaml.

No ViewState and PostBack events.

Follows the stateless nature of web.

Extensible and Pluggable framework.

Ideal platform for Web 2.0 applications.

Advantages of Web Form Model

Provides RAD development.

Easy development model for heavy data-driven LOB applications.

Provides rich controls.

Familiar model for windows form developers.

Which is the best approach?

The choice would be vary on different people. If you want more control over the HTML or you want Test Driven Development (TDD), or you care about web standards, accessibility, or you want to build SEO based URLs, you can choose MVC model. If you want rich controls and state oriented event-driven web development, you can choose Web Forms model. If you feel more comfortable with MVC, choose that model and you feel Web Form model is more comfortable, choose that model. Both are just choices. If you start your career with ASP.net Web Forms and do not have full knowledge of Web, it will be very difficult moving to MVC model.

I prefer MVC over Web Forms and I feel that Microsoft is going to a right direction through MVC. Its technical features as well as the open source nature are attracted me a lot.The MVC model allows me full control over the HTML and enables Test Driven Development (TDD). We can easily integrate with jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks with MVC. Using extension methods of C# 3.0, we can make powerful and rich HTML helper methods. I believe that tesatbility, refactoring capability and maintainability are the main factors for a successful project and prefer these factors than RAD capability. The MVC model allows to build highly testable, maintainable loosely coupled applications with good practices such as TDD, Seperation of Concerns (SoC) and Dependency Injection (DI). You MUST use ASP.NET MVC for public face internet applications.